Welcoming the suggestion of not leaving Ireland without staying in a country house, we booked two ensuite rooms for four adults in this accommodation for two nights.
At our arrival, which we previously communicated by phone, we’ve been welcomed by Ms. Patricia, who showed us our rooms. As soon as we’ve entered the house an overwhelming, unpleasant smell hit us, and we noticed that both the furniture and the carpet on the floor were dirty. We would have adapted to the situation, however, instead of the two ensuite rooms that we reserved and paid for, Ms. Patricia showed us firstly a room with the tiniest toilet, and secondly a room in a dusty and dirty garret without its own bathroom, but with a toilet that we should have shared with a family of five.
As we asked to have the two rooms with the sanitary services that we booked, the lady started rambling about the most dispare things and then, clearly annoyed, asked us “how dirty you think you are to need to wash yourselves that often?”. As a solution to our complaints, she offered us a room in what seemed to be a former barn, with a really tiny bathroom, which we ended up choosing, preferring it over the shared bathroom.
Before letting us into the rooms, she required a cash only payment on the spot, which we accepted on paying considering the deposit we previously payed.
During this whole discussion, Ms. Patricia did nothing to ease the mutual comprehension, on the contrary, she repeatedly tried to deflect the conversation, while she was impressively clear and direct about the request of a pre-payment.
At the first sight, both rooms turned out to be dirty, full of spider webs and spiders. The one in the barn was paved with porphyry (in terms of soil), covered almost entirely by carped soaked in humidity, with cat hair everywhere, especially on the bed sheets, and little dirty and broken furniture. The lady then confirmed that that is usually the “cat’s house”. The bed sheets and duvets were completely wet (I don't mean slightly humid, I mean wet). The bed had an electrically heated mattress topper that we turned on to dry the sheets to be able to sleep, but we had to remove the duvets for they were too dirty and humid to be used. Needless to say how stinky they were.
What is more, the cost of the accommodation included breakfast, which the lady told us would have been served at 11 a.m.; we asked to have it a bit earlier, as we were on a tour sightseeing, not staycating there, so we managed to arrange it at 9:30 a.m. instead. The morning after, when we got at the door of the breakfast room at the arranged time, she ignored us and slammed the door at our faces: in the room, which had a few tables arranged for breakfast, she only let a very kind family in, who got there later than us, and she refused to let us in too. The family, who witnessed our attempts to protest, managed to let us in with them and shared their own breakfast with us. The owner then told us that we should have called (half an hour prior, as the kind father of the family explained to us) to order what we wanted to eat, detail that she did not bother to share with us either the night before nor the same morning when she saw us waiting outside the breakfast room a little after 9 a.m.
We felt, and to this day feel, scammed and fooled. Needless to say that the day after we left the place as soon as we could, with our own clothes stinking of mold, giving up on the breakfast we paid for, in order to avoid further discussions and eccentricities.
Giving it a star only because it is not possibile to giving zero.